Online Video Remix Culture – Study of Jumpcut

Just found this interesting research paper from the Georgia Institute of Technology titled, “Remixing Authorship: Reconfiguring the Author in Online Video Remix Culture.” It addresses the following question: “How can authorship be conceptualized in an environment where individuals an easily appropriate, share, and remix media through online systems built to foster asynchronous collaboration?”

In this paper, they address this question through a study of he online video remixing community, Jumpcut. Through the study of Jumpcut, the research seeks to understand how authorship in remix culture is being affected by a different composition of environmental constraints.

Remix culture refers to a society that encourages derivative works by combining or modifying existing media.

Here is the abstract for the research which was released in May of 2007

In an abstract sense, authorship entails the constrained selection or generation of media and the organization and layout of that media in a larger structure. But authorship is more than just selection and organization; it is a complex construct incorporating concepts of originality, authority, intertextuality, and attribution. In this paper we explore these concepts as they relate to authorship and ask how they are changing in light of modes of collaborative authorship in remix culture. A detailed qualitative study of an online video remixing site is presented to help understand how the constraints of that environment are impacting authorial constructs. We discuss users’ self-conceptions as authors, and how values related to authorship are reflected to users through the interface and design of the site’s remixing and community tools. Finally, we present some implications of this work for the design of online communities for collaborative media creation and remixing.